


lift us back to the sky

by featherx



Series: requests [24]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Past Lives, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:35:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24540112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherx/pseuds/featherx
Summary: Yuri has dreams. He wants to graduate college. He wants to earn money. He wants to help children like him. He wants his mother to be happy.But Yuri also has dreams—they slip in when he’s most tired, most vulnerable after a long day’s work, and tempt him with lives he feels as if he’s lived through, once. He can’t even remember when they had started; the dreams have been a part of him for as long as he can remember.
Relationships: Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc/My Unit | Byleth
Series: requests [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1388335
Comments: 2
Kudos: 100





	lift us back to the sky

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: a continuation of [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24075622)! you need to have read it in order to understand what most of this is about  
> title is once again from [lifted up (1985) by passion pit](https://open.spotify.com/track/0WjvB0SzNvgmuM46UjcMr8?si=NcJ1Fik9SWmI-pyVZnNwIA)  
> thanks for requesting! ❤
> 
> rated M for sexual references, but nothing explicit

_“You alright?”_

_Shifting blankets. A pained groan. “Bad headache. Did something happen…?”_

_“You ran off and got yourself injured trying to protect me. Again.” Frustration rises up in waves. “How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t need to throw yourself into danger every time you see the opportunity? It’s like you like getting hurt—even outside the bedroom.”_

_“Y-Yuri!”_

_“What? I’m right. Look, you’re lucky I got to heal you in time. But…” The blankets are soft and sleep-warm, their smell and texture familiar after several months of sleeping wrapped up in them. “What if next time… I don’t make it?”_

_A pause—and then warmth spreading from a point where he presses his lips on Yuri’s forehead. “There won’t be a next time.”_

_“You always say that. And then a next time comes around.”_

_“This time, I mean it. I promise.”_

Promise… a promise… _Remember me… Wait for me…_

The room is stifling hot when Yuri shoots up from bed, throwing the blankets off of him. His clothes are damp with sweat and he has a feeling he’s just flung a bunch of his school notebooks to the floor, but none of that is as important as reaching out and grabbing the paper and pencil on his dresser.

_Again. It happened again._

Yuri screws his eyes shut, does his best to grab a hold of the already-fading memories— _green eyes,_ he remembers, green eyes, and he scrawls ragged pencil lines across the sheet of paper before the memory of it disappears. It’s one of the rare times he can recall facial features—the rest of the time Yuri can only ever remember the warmth of a touch, the fleeting dream leaving him with little else but emotion.

When he sets the pencil down, there’s a shaky, messy sketch of a face on the paper—short hair, the sharp line of a jaw, thinned lips. Green, slightly-slanted eyes. But already it looks wrong—the hair should be longer, the jaw sharper—or is it softer? The details are long out of reach, slipping through Yuri’s fingers like water joining the rest of the river of memories streaming away from him.

He crumples the paper up and throws it across the room.

Yuri has dreams. He wants to graduate college. He wants to earn money. He wants to help children like him. He wants his mother to be happy.

But Yuri also has _dreams—_ they slip in when he’s most tired, most vulnerable after a long day’s work, and tempt him with lives he feels as if he’s lived through, once. He can’t even remember when they had started; the dreams have been a part of him for as long as he can remember.

At first, they started small: the image of a tea table, loaded with confectioneries, the fragrance of hot tea wafting through the air. Yuri had snuck in teahouse after teahouse looking for one that would remind him of it, and hadn’t been able to stop drinking honey-blend since then. As he grew older they evolved into entire scenes, as if he were playing a part in a movie: sword fights, wielding magic, strange clothes that somehow fit just right on him.

He’d loved them, as a child. The dreams were something that kept him going, reminding him that something was waiting for him at the end of an exhausting day. And they gave him hope, that maybe these dreams meant something, that he was meant for more than the life his poverty-stricken family seemed doomed to.

Yet it hadn’t taken long for some of the dreams to become nightmares. Once he stared down the barrel of a gun—once he lay on the floor bleeding and bleeding and no one to help him—once he was in line with soldiers, comrades, when the sky exploded above them and he swore he woke up feeling his eyeballs melting into his skull. Yuri couldn’t bring himself to sleep after the last one—every time he shut his eyes he feared he would never open them again.

But always, always—someone is always in the dreams with him.

The dreams always felt so crystal clear while he was having them, enough that in the moment before he opened his eyes Yuri was sure he would remember every little detail—and then he’d wake up, and the dream would fade along with his sleep. It was only ever bits and pieces that he’d be able to latch onto before everything else disappeared—the warmth the other person made him feel, the way something in his chest bloomed and blossomed in a way nothing and no one else had and could ever made him feel before, even when Yuri experimented with others in high school. It made him crave the feeling, chase the desire, but in the end he was always left dull and empty.

But now— _now_ he’s starting to remember more, like how the person’s hair was short with long, uneven strands at the base of his neck—or how he can rarely smile more than a little quirk of his lips that has Yuri’s heart racing all the same—or how his eyes are green as spring leaves drifting down a trickling lake. it’s almost terrifying that Yuri remembers, so clearly, how those eyes look when they squeeze shut at a laugh, how they crinkle upwards in a smile, how they flutter closed in pleasure.

Yuri had made a promise with him of some sort—this, too, he knows to be true somehow, believes in it as a fact he would rather die before denying. _Remember me,_ Yuri had said, once, sometime between the end of this lifetime and the beginning of his first one. _Wait for me._

The dreams had never felt this real until now, with a promise—a promise _he_ had made, can so clearly remember making—to seal the deal, tying everything up with the red string of fate.

“What’re you taking for college, Yuri-bird?” Hapi had asked him, a few weeks before their entrance exams.

“Architecture,” Yuri replied, and hadn’t bothered expounding. The dreams weren’t real yet, and he needed to hold onto something with his hands, to know he was making something solid and tangible with his own self, something that wouldn’t slip out of his reach the moment he opened his eyes.

On some nondescript rainy afternoon, Yuri’s hand brushes against the fingers holding on to his tray of coffee orders, and he remembers. Byleth’s lips on his are solid, tangible, real, _familiar, right._

It’s hard remembering everything at first.

Combining his current life in the 21st century with the life he had led in ancient Fodlan makes for a disorienting daily routine. Sometimes Yuri’s hand automatically tries to cast a Heal spell whenever he gets a new cut on his fingers or he suffers a new bruise on his knee, and then he remembers he—or at least his body—is no longer capable of the magic he once wielded so easily. Sometimes he’s trying to outrun someone during Phys Ed and he’ll be waiting for the Fetters of Dromi to kick in and give him that extra boost of speed, only to realize his hand is bare and empty of the Hero’s Relic he had grown to rely on for far too many games of chance on the battlefield for Byleth’s comfort.

And of course, there’s Byleth himself.

Meeting Byleth again is easy—he hasn’t changed throughout the thousand years they spent apart, though Byleth himself admits his battle instincts have dulled over time. Somehow he hasn’t forgotten all of the little details and weird quirks Yuri had revealed more and more of in their married life, like how many sugar he takes in his tea and the exact manner he likes his clothes folded, and every tiny thing he remembers just makes Yuri’s chest twist and tighten in that blooming, blossoming emotion. He even remembers what Yuri likes in bed, which is quite the plus among everything else.

Yuri’s memories of his first life, in turn, feel dulled compared to the ones he has now—sometimes remembering something Byleth mentions feels like wading through murky water, and what stands out most are instincts and habits he developed throughout the war instead. He supposes he’s glad, then, that knowing exactly how Byleth likes his blowjobs became _habit._

It’s on one of those warm nights, curled up in Byleth’s blankets, that Yuri stirs awake. In Fodlan, the moonlight would have streamed in to glimmer across the floor and the edge of the bed—he can still remember how their bedroom had looked, though the finer details are hazy. In this era, it’s the city lights at midnight instead, twinkling like a cheap imitation of stars against the night sky.

Byleth’s eyes blink at him from the other side of the bed. Yuri vaguely registers the lack of his body heat and the cold beginning to creep in, which is probably what had woken him up in the first place. “What is it?”

“Sorry,” Byleth murmurs instead. He runs a hand through Yuri’s hair, tangled as it probably is, and Yuri’s still half-asleep enough to lean into it without reservation. “Did I wake you up?”

“You were staring pretty loudly.”

“Sorry,” Byleth says again, but he sounds more amused than apologetic.

That hardly does anything to smoothen the furrow from his brow, though, and Yuri shifts closer to press their chests close again, leaning up to kiss the center of his forehead. “Quit apologizing and tell me what’s up.”

“It’s nothing,” Byleth says, and Yuri supposes he should have expected that. With a sigh, Yuri leans back just enough to stare up at him, eyes narrowed.

It’s been several months since they’d first met—or met again, rather—at the coffee shop, long enough that Yuri’s sort of lost track of time and he’s fairly sure Byleth has too. In that span of time, Byleth’s snagged a job as a professor at the university Yuri studies in, thankfully as a foreign language teacher rather than any of the classes Yuri took up—it’d be difficult to take him seriously in a lecture, after all. And Yuri himself grabbed the part-time job as a barista once Byleth left the cafe, because the extra money wouldn’t hurt, and it meant getting to give Byleth bedroom eyes while serving him tea. Watching him squirm impatiently in place never gets old, even if it _has_ been a thousand years.

But he hasn’t been blind to how Byleth had started acting odd recently—it was small things, like panicking over a papercut Yuri got while working on some architectural plates, or constantly volunteering to work the stove whenever they cooked together in either of their respective apartments. At first Yuri attributed it to protectiveness, despite considering how minor the dangers of these are. Yet there’s something more to the behavior, he knows, because Byleth’s been growing more distant, too, but still watching Yuri with eyes like a hawk’s.

“Close your eyes a second,” Yuri says. Byleth obeys, and Yuri plants a kiss on both of his eyelids, then on the tip of his nose, on the corner of his jaw, on the column of his throat. With each touch he feels Byleth relaxing under him, until he’s comfortable enough again to wrap his arms around Yuri and press their lips together with a low hum. “Better?” Yuri mumbles.

“Mm. Thank you.” Byleth’s eyes flutter open again, mint-green lashes the same shade as his eyes. Well, of course they would be, but Yuri can’t help but be entranced by the sight all the same. Detail like this had never been so vivid in his dreams, for good reason—it makes seeing the real thing all the more worth it.

 _The dreams…_ Even after meeting Byleth, they haven’t stopped. They’ve grown less frequent, yes, but whenever Yuri isn’t expecting them, they come at him at full-force. What sticks out the most is that instead of memories from his past life, they seem to be ones he can’t remember at all—and half the time, they end in tragedy so terrifying that he always shoots up from bed, wishing desperately that these dreams were the ones he could forget rather than the ones that stubbornly stick to his memories like boa constrictors wrapping tight and squeezing his chest of any remotely positive emotions.

Gunpowder. Blood. Firestorms. Even now he has to suppress a shudder at the thought of them. It’s why he treasures nights like these, spent in the comfort of knowing Byleth is beside him—the dreams never come when he isn’t alone.

“Now you’re the one who looks troubled.” Byleth touches his chin, not tilting it up to make Yuri face him. Just… resting there. Letting Yuri know he’s here. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…” Yuri sighs. The topic of his dreams had never come up in conversation, and he hadn’t really made a conscious effort to keep them a secret, but now sharing information like this has him feeling like a cornered animal. The dreams were something he’d kept to himself, and only himself, for all twenty-something years of his life. “I have these… dreams, sometimes.”

Byleth blinks. “Okay?”

Yuri whaps him. “Take this more seriously, will you!”

“Wha! I-I am!”

“Ugh. How is ‘okay’ somehow just your response to everything?” Yuri relaxes back on the bed anyway, snickering softly at Byleth’s pout. Some things really do never change. “But… anyway, these dreams. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember. And I didn’t realize it at first, but they always had you.”

Byleth doesn’t say anything, but he’s watching Yuri with eyes like the beacons of lighthouses. It seems so long ago that those eyes were the only splash of color in a blurred face of black and white in Yuri’s dreams, when now he finds himself drawing Byleth’s face down to every last strand of his hair and curve of his lashes.

“They were memories of our past life, mostly,” Yuri continues, gaze flicking down to stare at a spot on Byleth’s neck. “Like… having tea with you. Treating your wounds after a battle. Uh, there was one time… well, never mind that.” He distinctly remembers waking up more than a bit… _bothered_ after he’d been shoved against a wall and fucked from behind. Yuri had known it was Byleth, instinctively, knew it couldn’t be anyone but him, but predictably enough he hadn’t been able to get a clear view of his face at the time still. “But recently, I’ve been having nightmares more than anything.”

Something flickers in Byleth’s eyes, an emotion Yuri doesn’t immediately catch until it’s gone. “Nightmares?”

“I keep dying.” Yuri swallows. “Over and over. I… We never brought this up, but. My life in Fodlan with you… That can’t have been my only life between then and now, and these dreams can’t just be dreams. Can they?”

It’s silent at first, and when Yuri looks back up it’s to see Byleth staring down at him, eyes darker than Yuri’s ever seen them before. He’s biting down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and even in the darkness the red stands out against the rest of his skin. Blood… Yuri wants nothing more than to reach up and kiss it away, but at the same time the rest of his body wants to recoil from it as well in a visceral reaction he’s never felt when looking down at a wound of his own before.

“They’re not,” Byleth eventually manages, and Yuri wonders if he tastes his own blood in his voice. “They’re not just dreams.”

He doesn’t need any prompting to continue, albeit after several stuttered breaths. “In the 1300s,” Byleth whispers, “the Hundred Years’ War. We were on opposing sides. In a fight, I shot you in the face.”

_Staring down the barrel of a gun._

“Somewhere around the 1870s, during the Philippine Revolution—you were a deserter of the Spaniards. You died protecting a rebel medic. I couldn’t help. Our blood mixed together on the floor.”

_Bleeding and bleeding and no one to help him—_

“1945.” Byleth screws his eyes shut, and Yuri scrambles to grab onto his wrist when he sees the tears trickling down. “You were a Japanese soldier. It was the only other life where we weren’t enemies—where I got to talk to you, speak with you, where you let me _love_ you, and then you walked to your death to the Hiroshima bombing and I couldn’t do anything to save you.”

_The sky exploding above him. Eyeballs melting into his skull._

“This isn’t your second life,” Byleth murmurs. “It’s your fifth. Fodlan, England, Philippines, Japan. America. You’re right—you did die, Yuri. Over and over. I—I should’ve told you, but—I was just so glad—that you’re finally alive, finally not on the other side of a war, finally not in a war at _all—_ but it’s stupid, because I keep worrying anyway, that one day something’s going to happen and the world’s going to take you away from me again—”

“Byleth.” Yuri inhales, exhales, and presses close to kiss the tears away. “Byleth, it’s—it’s okay. I’m here. I’m here now.” But Byleth’s entire body is shaking, shivering, and it takes everything in Yuri not to hold him in place. “I’m here,” he reminds him, “and I’m real. I’m here and I’m real and I’m alive.”

Byleth takes a deep, shuddering breath that he lets out through his mouth. “Yuri…”

“I’m sorry,” Yuri sighs, reaching around Byleth to comb a hand through his unkempt hair. In the darkness, the mint green almost looks like the dark blue it once was. “I didn’t—I made you wait so long. I… put you through so much pain.” If their positions were reversed—if Yuri had been the one to put a bullet through Byleth’s skull, if Yuri had been the one to lie helpless and watch Byleth die in front of him, if Yuri had been the one to hear about the bombing of Hiroshima right then and there—he can’t even imagine how he might have reacted. How he might have _felt._

But Byleth doesn’t have to imagine. Byleth’s life was all hypotheticals, composed of the what-ifs and the what-could-have-beens if he had just been faster, stronger, smarter. He used to beat himself up for the smallest of mistakes in the battlefield. What more unavoidable twists of fate like these?

“No, it’s fine. Don’t apologize.” Byleth presses a kiss to the crown of his head, warm breath ruffling stray strands of Yuri’s hair. “It was… a long time.”

“A thousand years,” Yuri dryly mutters, “is a lot longer than just ‘a long time.’”

“I suppose it is,” Byleth says, his smile shaky but genuine. “What matters is that it’s the past. It’s your history lesson for a reason. I don’t want it to repeat ever again. You’re right—you’re here now, and you’re real, and you’re okay. I… want to enjoy that. For as long as I can.”

His last words bounce around in Yuri’s head like a screensaver. _For as long as I can._ That’s right. The whole reason Byleth had gone through all that was because Yuri wasn’t immortal—because the first time around, Yuri hadn’t let Byleth join him in death. In this era, Yuri definitely won’t let him still, but if history repeated itself… if Yuri was fated to die, again and again, no matter what Byleth did…

“I have something for you,” Byleth meekly says, distracting Yuri from his downward spiral of thoughts. He sits up, prompting Yuri to follow his example, and opens a drawer from the bedside dresser—inside is a small velvet box, one Yuri’s eyes widen at. “Um, I… When you died, you told me to wait for you, remember?”

Yuri leans over and kisses over a bruise on the back of Byleth’s neck. “How could I forget?”

“I figured that meant you might want this again.” Byleth thumbs the box open, and there Yuri’s ring sits, as beautiful as he remembers it—a silver band with a violet gem embedded in the center. “I still wear the one you gave me,” Byleth says shyly, the aforementioned ring glittering on his finger, “but this one… I didn’t know where to keep it, especially while I was involved in the different wars. So I entrusted it with Flayn. But when we met again, well, I…”

He trails off, looking unsure on what to say, so Yuri takes pity on him and says, “I’m a little surprised you kept it all this time.”

“D—Does that mean you don’t want it anymore?” Byleth stammers, looking distressed.

Yuri grins teasingly. “I don’t know, I was kind of thinking that it’d be nice to drop by a ring store one of these days… but then again, your paycheck probably isn’t enough for any of the cheap ones.”

“Yes. Well. Blame _your_ university for that.”

“Oh, whatever, will you put that ring on me already?”

Byleth’s smile is radiant when he slips the ring on Yuri’s finger, and Yuri automatically begins to twist it, the motion comfortingly familiar—the spot it once occupied there sometimes felt empty, like phantom absence. “When you have to leave again,” Byleth whispers, gaze falling, “I… I’ll wait for you again. Like always. So you don’t have to worry. I’ll find you, no matter where you are, and… I’ll give you this ring again. As many times as it takes.”

Yuri looks down, hair shadowing his expression, but he’s really just trying to hide his thoughtful frown from Byleth. He twists the ring, around and around his finger. Fate was a cruel goddess. If she decided Yuri would die, over and over and over, what was the point of meeting Byleth again? Byleth would have lived through countless lifetimes, countless times watching Yuri die, and wouldn’t the suffering from that outweigh whatever Yuri might have to give him when— _if_ —they met up again?

“Say, Byleth.” Yuri looks up. “You’re immortal, aren’t you? Because of the goddess’ power?”

Byleth blinks. “Yeah. Sothis still talks to me in dreams sometimes. Mostly complaining that Jesus Christ has been stealing her spotlight for the past thousand years—”

“You ever make someone _else_ immortal before?”

Byleth’s entire person stills like a deer in the headlights—or, perhaps, a man before a promise. “No,” he says, slowly, “but… Rhea did it to my father, when he was about to die. She shared her blood with him.” He swallows, throat bobbing, and whispers, “Yuri, are you saying…”

“Do it.” Yuri pauses. “Well, not now. I’d like to get some sleep, since I still have that stupid exam tomorrow and it’s almost midterms week. But, yes, sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow during lunch. It shouldn’t take too long to share a bit of blood, would it?”

He doesn’t react fast enough to keep Byleth from crying again, this time burying his face into his shoulder, but Yuri foregoes telling him he’s a crybaby and just wraps his arms around him instead, drawing him closer. “I don’t want to leave you again,” Yuri sighs. “I don’t want to make you go through so much alone again. I… love you, okay? Always.”

“Always,” Byleth says, muffled by both his tears and Yuri’s shoulder, but Yuri hears him all the same.

This is here, this is now. This is real. And unlike his dreams, gone the instant he opens his eyes, Yuri doesn’t plan on forgetting this—any of this—ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading (❁´◡`❁) if you liked this, check out [this tweet](https://twitter.com/featherxs/status/1239788477807349760)!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/featherxs)   
>  [tumblr](http://featherxs.tumblr.com/)


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